A 10GbE Capture Platform: Snort, Bro, Suricata & Wireshark

Perhaps you’re responsible for your companies network security, or maybe you’re designing an appliance for your business? If so, then you’ve likely already become familiar with Snort, Bro, Suricata, and Wireshark. As you may have recently discovered for real performance with these applications at 10GbE speeds you need the proper adapter, and capture driver or you risk dropping vast numbers of packets. Furthermore, it is now possible to not only capture a copy of the packets received on the server but also transmitted. All while running your programs on other cores within the same server. Furthermore, if you’re interested in capturing all the received, transmitted, and virtual machine (VM) to VM traffic within your server then you can actually designate one VM to capture a copy of all the network traffic for analysis. To further sweeten things, this can also be done from within a Docker container built to handle capture.

Some might ask why you would want to capture transmitted packets and run them through Snort, Bro or Suricata? Simple, to look for outbound traffic patterns that might indicate a breach. Perhaps a VM on one of your servers has been compromised, and it is sending out your companies precious AutoCAD files in the middle of the night to a country in Asia you don’t do business with. If you’re not looking at transmitted packets you may never detect, or stop a breach of this nature. Setting up rules to look for file transfers of specific types, during specific times, or conforming to other criteria specific to outbound traffic is a fairly new trend. Also, this capture doesn’t have to be packets on your server, you can take a more traditional approach and dedicate a server for capture in every rack, then use an optical tap or the spanning port off a switch. In fact, you can install multiple adapters and aggregate the ports together until you hit the performance limits of your system.

Most accelerated 10G capture platforms require both a performance adapter and a special purpose capture driver. Furthermore to capture both received and transmitted packets in parallel you have only one choice, and that is an adapter and software from Solarflare. You can start with Solarflare’s Flareon Ultra SFN7122F adapter and a SolarCapture Live license, and as your needs grow scale to their dual 40G adapter the SFN7142Q.

Solarflare provides this high-performance capture platform designed specifically for engineers looking to build leading edge security solutions. Let’s take a closer look at the adapter and software. The network server adapter, the Solarflare SFN7122F, is a board that contains one Solarflare single core Ethernet controller chip. This Ethernet controller core on this chip has multiple packet engines each dedicated to processing received or transmitted packets. This enables the SFN7122F adapter to support wire-rate lossless packet capture, even with huge bursts of the smallest sized packets (64 bytes each) on a single port. This dedication of resources enables transmitting wire-rate 64-byte packets at the same time, on the same interface, and in parallel, without impacting capture performance. Furthermore, the SFN7142Q utilizes the same Ethernet controller, but with two of these on the same chip so it can support capture on two 40G ports, or four 10G port, or wire-rate lossless capture on two 10G ports.

The next component in this platform is SolarCapture Live (SCL), which provides a complete Libpcap replacement library, and a Snort DAQ interface. This allows for two fairly seamless methods for easily connecting to Snort. If SCL is initialized in cluster mode it can spawn multiple capture instances, up to one per core, and deliver all network packets in Libpcap format spread across these cores. SCL then uses advanced receive flow steering to flow-hash the packets across all of these capture nodes within the capture cluster. Flow-hashing is the process of looking at several key fields in the packet header then always routing all the traffic from a given flow consistently to the same cluster node (core) so security applications like Snort, Suricata and Bro can always see all the given data for that specific network flow.

This Solarflare capture platform also supports an optional Solarflare Precision Time Protocol (PTP) software license that can accept an external hardware Pulse Per Second (PPS) signal (via an additional optional bracket kit) which provides the necessary mini-BNC connectors that can then be used to attach the adapter to an external master clock. Unlike similar adapters, this optional PCIe faceplate has a second mini-BNC connector to support daisy chaining the clock signal out of the adapter into another adapter. These Solarflare adapters include a highly precise clock chip, the Stratum 3, this ensures that time stamping is accurate to within 100 nanoseconds from the PTP master, precision time stamping is typically only available on much more expensive FPGA based adapters. Furthermore, the PTP license enables time stamping for the capture of both received and transmitted packets, so you can use it to measure application performance. Additionally, Solarflare’s 100 nanosecond precision is 15X more precise than a competing adapter at a similar price point that only captures and time stamps inbound packets.

So if you’re looking to get into packet capture for security monitoring or performance analysis, please consider contacting Solarflare, and ask about their SFN7122F with SolarCapture Live. You’ll be pleasantly surprised at how well it performs when compared to the much more expensive FPGA based solutions which sell for 5X or more the price of this unique bundle.